Ich
by xxCerezasxx
Summary: Written for the Reverse Big Bang. Something is preying on the people of a small town in Southern Florida. Sam and Dean go to investigate. Sam/Dean one-sided, more of a case-fic than Wincest.


**Disclaimer:I don't own Supernatural in any way, shape, or form. Though, I think we all wish we did.**

**Pairing:Sam/Dean usty/one-sided.  
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**This was written for the Reverse Big Bang over on livejournal. The art I drew this fic for is absolutely gorgeous, don't hesitate to ask for a link to it, it's so, so pretty and stunning and dark and horrific. Melanth0 has so much talent.**

**Warnings: Some blood, gore, violence and adult language. There are some deaths, but they are of minor characters.**

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The sun burns the backs of the Phillipps boys' necks as they sit on an old raft on the pond outside their home in southern Florida. The water is gentle, sloshing softly against the wood, rocking the boys on a water-logged, rotting cradle. Their feet swing in the water, jeans rolled up past their knees, and their fishing lures bob orange and white on the surface, bright like gumballs on blue-green glass.

"I'm bored." Ty complains, kicking his small feet. He's a young boy, five and a half years old, fishing pole nearly too thick for his hands. Ty holds the base between his knees, keeps two tiny fingers around the reel, anticipating a fish that have yet to come. He's bored and tired and hungry, thinking of the things young children allow their minds to wander off to: Saturday afternoon cartoons and video games, the action figures neglected at the bottom of his toy chest. He wants instant gratification; he wants to watch a fish swallow his lure the second he casts out.

"You gotta be patient, stupid." Bryan jabs his little brother in the ribs, not quite hard enough to hurt, more playful than frustrated. He's brought him out here to teach his brother how to fish, decided early on that they were going to do things right. Fishing is a sport of patience, long afternoons on the water, coolers of icy beer slowly growing warm in the bottom of the boat, stagnant heat and buzzing insects. Bryan remembers fishing with their father once, the last day they ever spent together, and he wants to give Ty something like that, something quiet and soulful and deep.

The pond is unusually quiet, unnatural silence hanging thick as humidity in the summer air. But the boys notice nothing; wriggle their toes in the refreshing cold of the water, mouths sour with the taste of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches prepared with the loving care of their mother. She'd spread the peanut butter and jelly one separate pieces of bread, cut off the crusts just as her sons liked, packed them in neat, brown paper bags, watched them run through the back door while she stood in the kitchen, baby on her hip. Years later, when her house is completely empty, nothing but fading pictures on the mantle, she'll sit at the kitchen table and stare through the screen door and see her boys alive and beautiful again, blowing her kisses over their shoulders, as real as the lingering love of a mother for children lost to time.

Ty's lure is tugged out of sight, down into the depths, before it pops back up to dance along the water.

"I got one!" Ty cries, bouncing where he sits, rocking the dock a little, turning the reel as quickly as his hand can move. He has his very first and ever fish and he's going to show it to his mom and they'll eat it for dinner and it'll be the best dinner they've ever had.

"Tug up." Ty does as Bryan says, like he always does, adoration and obedience intertwined inside him, coiling together so one ends where the other begins. Ty will always do what his big brother asks of him, forever and always.

The hook pops from the water, strangely light, their hard-dug bait gone. He'd helped gather the worms himself, out with Bryan at five in the morning, an hour before the sun came up.

"It's not there!" He wails, inconsolable, devastated as only a five-year-old can be. His first fish and it is_ gone _and now he has nothing to take home but worm guts and a sunburned neck.

"That shit happens; you'll just have to try again." Bryan takes the fishing rod from his brother, impales a struggling, vigorous minnow to the end of the hook. "Try using some bigger bait this time." As soon as the minnow hits the water it swims with all its might, in every direction, panicked and twitchy, terrified of everything beneath the water the boys can't see.

This time the pull on the hook is strong enough to draw out all one hundred feet of line in six seconds. The line goes bowstring tight and for a glorious, hopeful moment Bryan thinks it's going to hold, but then the fish swims down again and Ty tips over along with the pole, dragged under by the inhuman force. "Ty!" Bryan is in the water in an instant, fear replacing the oxygen in his blood, eyes straining to see the shape of his beloved little brother in the murkiness. He swims and swims, so long that his lungs are ready to burst, ready to trigger an automatic inhalation that will drown him for sure. He'll open his mouth and suck down water, fill up his lungs, drown even if he makes it back to the surface, sluggish and water-full. The deadly gulp never comes, because Bryan doesn't live long enough. In the seconds before death he's reunited with his little brother and he curls a hand in Ty's soaked collar, hauls him close. The boys drift there amid the growing red of their blood as flesh is pulled from their baby-soft cheeks.

The surface of the pond ripples once, discarded fishing pole shooting up from the depths, and then the water goes smooth and motionless as polished ice.

* * *

Dean has always been certain that the most fucked up stuff happened in Florida. There was just something about the place, maybe the swamps, the everglades where alligators and giant pythons lurk beneath the water, where there is so much non-supernatural stuff that could kill you it seems unfair that monsters are allowed to live there too. There had been a creature once, a big, slimy green thing, with teeth like a gator on steroids that had terrorized a popular tourist attraction. It had dragged six people down into the muddy water before he and dad had managed to stab it square between the eyes with a harpoon that was like something right out of _Jaws_. He'd fancied himself a little like Quint after that, stupid and ridiculous as the notion was to anyone who wasn't a sixteen year old boy who had spent more time hunting evil than going to school.

After the incident with the possessed lake he wasn't too fond of water where he couldn't see the bottom, where it isn't clear but a shade closer to brown mixed with blue and green. The pond outside the home of the missing boys in Florida is no exception. It isn't very big, small even for a pond, the kind of place all the bigger, more badass bodies of water would pick on if they could. It's peaceful, though, still as death, quiet as a corpse in its grave. It isn't a good sort of calm, because the birds won't sing in the trees and there are no animal tracks to indicate anything had ever risked drinking from the water before. He doesn't like it. There's an uneasiness low in his gut, the sharp instinct of a experience hunter and he turns back to join Sam with the grieving mother on the patio.

"They left at nine in the morning, is that correct?" Sam is always so professional about this stuff. He has a real knack for it, he'd have been good as a detective or a therapist or a reporter or any honest, nine-to-five job he will never have.

"Yes, it was around nine." The mother, Marcy Phillipps, sniffles, hugging a dark haired baby girl closer to her chest, like she is never going to let the toddler go. "I made them some sandwiches for lunch and watched them leave." She's a small woman, but her thighs are powerful, curved and muscular, and her waist is too thick for her to ever be considered petite. She's oddly beautiful in an unconventional way, a too big nose that clashes with her delicate cheekbones, breasts that are barely even there, small and round and firm in her faded blue tank-top. She looks like grief warmed a thousand times over and it stings just to look at, hurts in that always aching part of his heart.

"Did you notice anyone suspicious in the neighborhood?"

"No." Marcy wipes at the trickle of tears on her cheeks. "Why are you asking that? The police said it was most likely an alligator." The baby in her arms whines, sucks greedily on a fist and stares at Dean, dark black eyes huge and curious.

"This are just routine questions; it's policy, ma'am." He can't think of anything better to say. He's trying to soothe her worries but he's distracted by the unblinking gaze of the little girl sitting in her lap. "We have to ask."

"Oh." She relaxes her grip on the toddler, who instantly reaches out for him and Sam both, cooing and waving her spit-wet hands.

"What time were your sons supposed to be home?" Sam goes back into perfectly polite interrogator mode, nodding and humming in response to Marcy's answers while he scribbles notes on a pad neither of them would ever look at again.

He takes the baby into his lap eventually, because she won't stop gurgling and waving at him, because her mother is dissolving into heart-wrenching, body-wracking sobs that young kids should never hear. She is a warm, tiny weight on him, sturdy little feet digging into his thighs as she stands on him, looking over his shoulder and ibeyond/i. He follows her eyes and the uncoordinated motions of her fingers, until his gaze finds the pond settles on a fading, half-dead ripple spreading slow across the surface of the water.

* * *

The golf course is deserted early on Sunday mornings. Manuel Pena has concluded that this was the best hour to come out and practice his backswing, the rare moment the green is clear of businessmen and the elderly driving their immaculate golf carts while wearing their brightly colored polo shirts. The course also happens to be free of any personnel, which makes it all the better. The fees are more than he can afford. His wife would kill him if he spent their already-stretched-thin budget on a round of golf.

He watches the sun begin to rise along the coast, the sky bleed from black to gray to purple and orange and pink at once. On hole seven, a water hazard, the sun reflects warmly at him, water swirling with colors that are not its own, just a natural, distorted mirror for the sky. Nothing ever looks the same in a reflection on the water; it becomes warped and magical, images twisted like in a funhouse mirror.

For the first time in over a decade, proof that age is inescapable regardless of how often he dyes the silver at his temples black — his swing falls short and his ball lands in the river with a plop, sinks with a whisper and vanishes from sight. Manuel swears and wades in, the water up to his mid-thighs, well above where his shorts end. He should be worried about alligators, but he hasn't seen any that morning and they lumber in sight on the courses, floating idly or heating their backs and bellies in the sun. The water gets deeper, deeper until it rises waist high, cold enough to make him shiver despite the eighty-three degree heat. His ball is somewhere at the bottom and if his isn't, some other poor bastard's is. He just needs a ball, he isn't about to get sentimental and try to find his specifically.

Something grabs his leg and he loses his balance and falls backwards into the river, water instantly rushing up his nose, down his throat, into his lungs. He scrambles to his feet, coughing and sputtering, spitting water out between his teeth. _Alligator_ his mind screams as panic creeps over him as quickly as the chill from the water, adrenaline making him a special brand of brave and stupid. He has to get to the shore, nothing else matters, his ball be damned.

What rises out of the water for him isn't human, isn't a gator either, is a remnant of his childhood, the stories read to him before bed. _My God_ he thinks, though he knows God has nothing and yet everything to do with this. His faith is being tested, he's sure of it, his belief and love for the Holy Father tested by a creature spawned from a horrible union between Satan and hell. Teeth latch onto him, razor-sharp and jagged, deformed imitations of incisors that bite away mouthfuls of his flesh, the muscle in his calves. One of the bites tears his tendon and he knows he'll never stand again. He drowns slowly in the waist-high water while he watches the sky finally change to a beautiful, summer blue, and he thinks of his wife and four children, of an endless golf course and eternal happiness, every stroke a hole in one.

* * *

Sam and Dean sit on the roof of the Impala for the first time in months, almost a year. Sam presses the cool side of his bottle of beer to his forehead, condensation joining the moisture of his own perspiration. Dusk in Florida only offers a small reprieve from the unyielding heat, the humidity as high as ever.

"Do you really think this is going to work?" Dean has a gun in his hand, his favorite, silver metal glinting glossy against the skin of Dean's palm. "Shouldn't we try live bait or something?"

"If you want to go for a swim, be my guest." Sam doesn't like anything about this case; it is too unsettling, too unpredictable. This isn't his preferred method of hunting, going in with the guns half-cocked, a rough estimate at best. He needs cold, hard facts, two dozen supporting texts on exactly how to kill something and put it to rest. There are too many possibilities here: water spirits and water sirens, unheard-of monsters that can span countless lakes, as old as time, angry and vengeful spirits, creatures that can be perfectly explained by modern science, alligators and large snakes, bull sharks that swim up creeks.

"Hell no." Dean laughs exactly as he always has, just as Sam remembers, not a change in four years. It amazes him sometimes, how easily he's slipped back in, how the life he has now is so drastically different from what he'd had planned. Death and revenge and evil do things like that, shake up the future, alter the present, rearrange the intricacies of time. He's always thought time and destiny were his own, but now he knows some things are beyond his control, malleable only by cosmic hands. "It could be an alligator though, right? Are we allowed to shoot alligators? Are they endangered?"

"If it ate those two boys I think we're allowed to shoot it." It would be an open and shut case if it was an alligator. They'd shoot it; deliver it to the wildlife services, slice open its belly and remnants of the Phillipps boys would spill out; their plastic red and blue Superman watches, buttons and zippers from their matching jeans.

As the sun begins its descent in earnest the pond flickers with pink and gold, the surface mirror smooth and just as reflective. It will be dark soon enough and then they'll go in, settle somewhere close and check for supernatural activity. Water spirits are rare in a body of water this size, but Naiads are known for this type of thing. They are infatuated with beauty, the lore says, and they'll grip beautiful men and drag them down to live with them forever, unaware or uncaring that the man will inevitably drown. He hasn't read a legend of Naiads stealing children; he can only assume that there is beauty in youth, in the boys' innocence and vulnerability, even if the boys themselves hadn't been particularly beautiful, no more so than the average child. He considers letting Dean play bait, because his brother would get a kick out of that, flaunting his goods for a gang of mystical man-snatchers. Sam would have to hear about it for weeks.

"I need to take a piss." Dean hops off the hood, tucks his gun into his pocket. There is sweat on the back of his neck; Sam can see the gleam of it in the last rays of light, standing out like small, clear beads. The sky has shifted in that surreal moment when the sun disappears completely, nothing beyond the horizon but shadowed stretches of land. He misses sunsets in California, the knowledge that the sun was sinking for certain, that night has arrived for the last of the continental United States. He could smell the oceans some nights when the air was still enough, if he closed his eyes and focused. "Are you planning on holding it for me or something?" Dean has his jeans unzipped and he watches a single dribble of moisture move from Dean's temple to the underside of his chin, drip off and fall.

"Fuck you."

There's a ripple in the water, a burst of bubbles. "Dean." He says, pulling out his own gun, slipping to his feet.

"Monster won't even let me friggin' pee, man." Dean zips back up; frowning.

The thing rises from the water and Sam had expected something grotesquely ugly, with fangs and claws and seaweed-like skin, webbed feet and gaping gills across its neck. Reality isn't so impressive. An alligator, he lowers his gun, it's only an alligator. The alligator is large, more than large enough to eat two children, about eight feet from nose to tail, and in the lack of light it's almost black. In a few minutes it would be completely invisible except for the unnatural shine of its eyes. "Huh." Dean shrugs, sounding disappointed, grabbing Sam's beer off the hood of the Impala and taking one last drink from it. "Just an alligator, small world." Dean walks forward, presumably to shoot it, and it strikes Sam as wrong, somehow, to be killing a creature that isn't inherently evil, isn't demonic and forged from sulfur and blood.

The creature hisses as Dean approaches, snaps its jaws, agitated and aggressive. He's about to warn Dean to stay back, because an alligator bite to his leg would set them back weeks, when the alligator hisses louder than ever and lurches backwards, as if pulled by an invisible force. It_ is_ being pulled, he can see it, something has the gator by the tail, is dragging it back into the pond, into the depths. "The fuck is that." Dean grabs the empty beer bottle by the neck and throws it hard as he can at the water near the alligator's tail, where something is tugging it to its death. The bottle hits a solid mass but has little effect. In mere seconds the pond is still again but the water is growing steadily darker, tainted by a spreading pool of blood. "I don't think I'm going near the pond right now."

"Good idea, we should go." He spins on his heel, ready to leave and research all the things that can haul a full grown alligator down and eat it alive. Something hits his back, suddenly, sharply, a quick burst of pain. It's the beer bottle Dean threw, dripping wet, half full of water and blood.

"Still think we should go?" Dean asks, picking up the bottle, dumping the liquid inside out into the dirt.

"Unless you want to end up like the alligator."

Dean pauses like he does when he's deep in thought, the metaphorical wheels in his head turning.

"It could be an even bigger alligator?"

"I don't think alligators can throw, they don't have thumbs." There is always the possibility of a genetically mutated alligator, that maybe _do_ have thumbs, but that is too close to science fiction to be possible. A supernatural alligator he can fathom, a scientifically enhanced one he cannot.

"Yeah." Dean wipes bloody water off his fingertips and onto his jeans. "I'm ready to call it a night."

* * *

Whitney Murphy is piss ass drunk as he stumbles home at three in the morning. He still has a beer in his hand from the party, the taste of cherry Jell-O shots and vodka in the back of his throat. The summer before college is supposed to be nothing but fun, wild parties and getting wasted with friends, fucking every girl he can. He's making the most of it, sleeping until four every afternoon then going out to do it all again. His parents would kill him for getting home so late, ordinarily, but his mother has started getting her 'headaches' more frequently and dad is logging longer hours at the office. No one much notices if he comes home a couple hours late.

That doesn't mean he can take his sweet time getting home, though.

He's too drunk to even try driving. There are limits to that kind of shit; he won't make it ten feet without getting pulled over or running into a tree or a ditch. He doesn't need to total another car, his dad is still pissed about the dent he put in the BMW from the time he ran into a fire hydrant. It isn't that long of a walk, not if he can remember which shortcut to take. He has to climb a couple fences and run through a backyard or two, but then he's home free. The entire shortcut saves him about eight blocks altogether.

He feels like he might puke after he jumps the first fence, his stomach rolling, spit turning sour-sweet. He didn't exactly climb the fence, he's far too wasted for that, he sort of fell over the top of it, threw a leg over and dropped. He's drunk enough it doesn't hurt, only stuns him a little, his limbs feeling rubbery and loose, uncoordinated as fuck. He isn't sure he'll be making it home; he might turn around and sleep in his car, curl up in the bushes somewhere and wait until his head is clearer. He's done that before, it's not too bad, uncomfortable but most things in life are anyways. The moon is bright and it's kind of beautiful out, all peaceful and quiet, everything bathed in silvery light.

There's a sound in the stillness and he is way more wrecked than he thought, because he's damn sure he hears a voice, a soft, girly giggle.

"Hey." His words are slurring and it's kind of hilarious.

The girl in the water doesn't answer, just giggles again and hides her face in her hands. She's pale, white as the moon, with thick, dark hair. "S'late to go for a swim." He tries to give his best smile, puffs out his chest. He can make drunk look fucking sexy if he works hard enough.

She doesn't answer, just leans back in the water, and reveals that she isn't wearing any sort of top. Her boobs are huge, not the pathetic things that half the girls in his class have. They're even bigger than some of the cheerleaders', round and high and _awesome_. He could fit his entire hand around one of them and he wants to, really, really bad. "What's your name?" She's quiet, doesn't do more than tilt her head and stare at him. Her eyes are black as ink, dark as her hair, and they shine wetly while she watches him. "Can you hear me?" She laughs again, the taunting and sexy thing that girls do. "Eng-lish?" He waves his hands, points to his mouth. She's either deaf or foreign, he hopes she's foreign. He can't wait to tell his friends he went skinny dipping with a hot Asian chick at three in the morning. "Gonna come in too."

He doesn't feel like throwing up anymore and he can stand without wobbling. He's got this shit down. It takes him a few tries to kick off his shoes, even longer to pull off his socks, but the rest of his clothes come off easy. He was made to be naked, that's what washboard abs are for, to score with the ladies. "Just a second, baby." He thinks he might drown, still so drunk that his arms and legs move shitty and slow. He'll risk it though, because if he was gonna go, he wants to go out trying to get some action. That's the honorable way to die, to drown with a tit in each hand, his tongue down a smokin' girls' throat. "Oh shit." The water is fucking _cold_, definitely not good for the size of his dick. He's gotta impress her, can't do that if his balls retreat up against his body. Size is very important and normally he has some size to spare, definitely a good length, no one has ever complained. "Fancy seein' you." He laughs at his own joke for her since she can't get his comedic, drunken genius. "It's dangerous out here, you know. Alligators." He growls and snaps his teeth. "Dangerous."

He sticks to the shallows but she swims farther out, graceful strokes of her arm as she goes. He probably looks like he's drowning as he follows her, splashing and noisy, gnads all snuggled into the heat of his body. He's going to get his hands on those boobs though, even if he has to tread water for an hour to do it. "You're like, a really good swimmer." He's never flirted with a chick who can't understand him before; he's making shit up as he goes.

She cocks her head at him, silent and peering, _studying_; it creeps him out a little, but he uses the opportunity to move in for a kiss, to get to second base. She doesn't really kiss him but she lets him cup her tits. Her skin is colder than the water, cold enough it's like touching a corpse. She's been in the water a long ass time to get this cold. "You're freezing." He pants into the side of her neck, trembling a little with the effort of staying afloat using just his legs. His muscles burn but it's definitely worth it. Boobs are always worth it. "How 'bout we warm you up?" Her stomach is flat, clammy and cool, weirdly textured. He thinks he might be way more wasted than he first thought.

He slides his hand down past her belly button, aiming to put his fingers some place warmer. He's like, really, super, ultra drunk because he can't _find_ it, must have strayed to her hip or something instead. He readjusts and _holy fuck_, he is definitely not off target. He can feel the horror grow on his face, stretch out, expand, clear his head instantly sober.

His fingers don't press into anything human. Below her waist she's solid flesh, slippery as fish scales. He hesitantly searches for legs, hoping for a deformed, grotesque pussy with a skin condition. There's nothing and he kicks away, splashes back. She follows him, her strokes graceful and quick, fluid through the water. Her teeth are sharp points when she smiles and he's dead, deader than dead, dead as the cat his mom ran over when he was six. He doesn't fight her, knows there's no chance he's gonna make it back to the shore. She kisses him and tastes the salt in his blood as she chomps his tongue in two, pulls it right out of his mouth like something out of a horror movie. He can't see but he thinks the water around him is red with blood the way it is after shark attacks in the movies.

She eats him belly first, slices his stomach open and digs out the things inside him. He never knew there was pain this bad, fucking immobilizing and blinding. He never thought he'd die this way either. Mermaids were supposed to be hot chicks with a colorful fin and sea-shell bra, not monsters, icy creatures that eat his intestines steaming from his abdomen, blood smeared dark around its mouth.

She opens her mouth and he thinks she's going to speak, say _something_, but all that comes out is a laugh as shrill and eerie as the cry of gulls along the coast of the sea.

* * *

They get to the golf course in time to watch police bring up the remains of Manuel Pena, who is officially no longer a missing person. The cops lay the body on the grass, what's left of the bloated, brown and gray flesh shiny with water and body fluids against the mat of vibrant green. Stink rises from the parts, the decomposed, water-logged femur, skull stripped of its first few layers of skin, one eyeball dangling from its socket. Dean's stomach churns once just looking at it, hot and queasy, insides turned to liquid. Most of Pena's bones are intact, the long line of his spine connected, his torso and chest still in one piece. The rest of him, the smaller, looser bones are scattered at the bottom of the river, lodged in the mud, others swept away by the current. The air's hot and thick again, carries the scent of rotten, bloody things, sour and nasty.

He doesn't know what Sam is thinking, but he can bet they're on the same wavelength with this one. Three bodies in four days, maybe more that will stay missing forever, dragged down and eaten fully, scraps overlooked by the monster gobbled up by hungry fish. He starts wondering about kelpies in the back of his mind, because technically it fits, though, a friggin' horse would be a pretty noticeable thing to have around a golf course.

"Do you guys usually lose three people per week?" He can't help but sound cocky and condescending when he strides over to the local sheriff. Civilian agencies have their limitations, obviously, but this guy is especially stupid if he hasn't at least sent out a warning telling people to stay the fuck out of the water.

"Most that ever goes missing around here are house pets." The sheriff, a sweaty, stubby man named Joe, wipes his shiny forehead with a handkerchief. There are beads of sweat caught in the gray and black hair of his mustache and his uniform looks wet all the way from the neck to the lower part of his back. "I don't understand why the Feds want in on this."

"Lotta pressure to investigate things like this before people start crying about a serial killer. There are elections to think about and in the end all it comes down to is who's tougher on crime and who thought a few missing kids in Florida were worth overlooking."

Joe wipes his face again, grease oozing out of every possible pore.

"It was a damn shame what happened to the Phillips boys."

"You knew the family?" They never got much out of Marcy Phillips and he can't blame her. He'd break down crying too if he lost his children like she had, all in one horrible summer afternoon.

"My wife and Marcy went to high school together."

One of the divers waddles out of the water, black flippers leaving imprints in the grass. He wonders if the golf course will sue the city for the cash to repair the green. The diver sets a plastic baggie beside Pena's body and Dean can see the round, sausage shape of fingers through the clear plastic. He scoots a little closer and there are small chunks missing from the fingers where something has nibbled on them like they were pieces of baby corn. "They were good kids, never a lick of trouble. They were so excited when Marcy adopted little Sophia."

"And him?" He motions towards the body with his head. The naked skull smiles at him, lips ripped away, teeth smudged brown with mud and green with stringy bits of aquatic plants.

"Manuel Pena, he worked construction." Joe wheezes, gasping for breath in the stifling heat. Dean feels it too, the stickiness around his collar, t-shirt sticking to the base of his spine. "We're assuming it's Pena. We have to wait for the dental records to confirm."

The gruesome teeth keep on smiling, even as an eight-legged water spider crawls out of the cavern of the empty mouth and flies arrive to lay their eggs.

"When did he go missing?"

"'Bout two days ago, his wife called it in this morning."

They stand staring at the surface of the river, the shadow deep blue. Their reflections are warped, distorted and quivering. He looks like a ghost of himself, intangible and threatening to disappear if a load of rock is shot into his back. Over his shoulder Sam chats up the pretty paramedic, serious and professional, helps her bag the body and lift it onto the stretcher, strap it into place. Sam asks about things like rigor mortis and cause of death, authentic FBI kind of questions, and he pulls the latex gloves she made him put on off with a sharp snap.

"We won't take up anymore of your time; give us a call if you learn anything new." The fake business cards were Sam's idea, because his little brother is genius like that, so achingly smart.

Joe grunts a response and Dean thinks he can see bodies moving beneath the water, small, water-swollen hands and faces, two boys peering up at him, silent and chalk white, eyes glazed over white and blue. He supposes they might be back in a decade or two to get rid of another haunting, an entire waterway possessed just like the lake that became a boy's grave. The ones who die the worst deaths always return angry. He could see Pena and Ty and Bryan by the time he's thirty, if he lives that long, that is, and his instincts say he won't, that he's come too close to dying already, that he's got a year or two at best. He's got a heart inside his chest that doesn't belong to him and the blood of a brain tumor patient on his hands.

"That body was mutilated." Sam's cheeks are a little pale and he swallows hard, shakes his head as if that will clear the images from his brain. "It ate _around_ the fat and the muscle. It knew where the best places for meat were."

"So we have a monster with butchering expertise."

"It's strong too, some of the bones were broken in half and the marrow sucked out. This thing has hands; the medic said she didn't see any teeth marks on the skeleton."

"Water god? Pagan gods can be nasty sons of bitches." He and his dad hunted an Aztec corn goddess who had taken to ripping the hearts out of peoples' chests and eating them the fall he was twenty-three. She'd gone down hard and messy, in a brilliant spray of blood, and Dean could feel the heat of her fingertips against his skin for weeks after.

"Maybe." Sam leans back in the seat like he has since he was four and allowed to sit in a big boy seat. It's so good to have him in the car again, sighing and bitching and breathing, that he knows it'll crush him when Sam inevitably leaves again. "I don't think there's anything local, though."

"Could be imported or passing through." Bloodthirsty gods need to make pit stops too, he supposes. "Florida's a great place for a vacation."

"Especially if you're a water-bound deity." Sam's bangs are plastered to his forehead with sweat and he shoves them back with his palm as he waits for the air conditioner to kick on.

* * *

His beer has gone warm in his hand. He's neglected it in favor of his laptop, half a dozen anthropology and mythology articles on water related creatures open. The Grootsang is too big and too impossible. Bunyips are native to Australia and not even relatively humanoid. Kappas love to feed on children, but are Japanese in origin, and none of the legends indicate they can cross oceans; they are strictly freshwater-confined. Rusalkas fit the pattern to a T, jiaolongs as well. There are too many and too much and his eyes burn from looking at the computer screen for hours.

"Did dad call?" Dean comes out of the bathroom in just a towel, face flushed from the heat of the water and steam, his expression hopeful and eager. Sometimes he wonders how deep his brother's loyalty to their father goes, how it coexists with Dean's complete denial, whether the two are one and the same.

"He didn't call when you were dying, why would he suddenly call now?"

Dean doesn't answer, but the muscles in his back tense as he pulls on a t-shirt and drops the towel. He gets a glimpse of Dean's bare ass, which he's seen moon him a hundred times since he and Dean were old enough to start prank wars. He used to cover his eyes and screech, cemented into the role of disgusted little brother. The sight doesn't repulse him as much as it should and that scares him more than any creature lurking in the lakes and rivers of Florida ever could.

"Did you find anything useful online?" Dean tugs on a pair of boxers, followed by his favorite jeans, the ones that replaced the pair that was splattered with Sam's blood from a Domovoi gone bad in a building marked for demolition.

"I think it's a rusalka. They're Slavic water spirits, kind of like water nymphs. Basically they are the Slavic version of a woman in white and they can leave the water at night to sit on docks and banks to seduce men. They kill kids too; they lure them in with presents of candy and fruit." The pictures depict beautiful, horrific women with perpetually wet hair and pale skin, eyes that shine green in the night and lack pupils. How something like a rasullka can seduce a man he will never understand.

"How do we kill it? Please tell me we get to burn it. I'm in the mood for a salt and burn."

"Believe it or not, we just have to dry her hair. If her hair dries out, she dies." There are moments when mythology astounds him and for once, truly seems ridiculous and something out of fiction.

"That's kind of anticlimactic. Okay: let's grab some blow-dryers and style the bitch's hair." Dean tucks his gun into the back of his jeans, out of habit more than anything else, and laces up his boots, child-like glee making his eyes bright.

"We have to separate the rusalka from her comb first. She's powerless if you take her comb."

Dean raises an eyebrow; unconvinced.

"A comb?"

"A magic comb."

"Eh, I've heard crazier shit."

To keep Dean happy they decide that torching the rusalka is the most effective way to dry out its hair. Dean volunteers to be the one to get the comb, because Dean can't say no to being live bait, not if it means he can risk his life. Sam can see it already, the rusalka twisting and dancing in the moonlight, with eerie pale limbs and shining eyes. She'll beckon to Dean; sing a song of seduction as her hair drips water onto her mud-caked feet. Dean will go to her, smiling and transfixed, stupid and beautiful, seemingly under her spell. She'll wrap Dean in her arms, ready to drag him to the river bottom, to feast in private, and he'll snatch the comb from her hair, crack it in two over his knee. Then Sam will be there with Dean and they'll light her up, watch her smoke and sizzle, burn to a fine, black crisp.

The pond where the kids disappeared is spooky still, its water inky dark in the insufficient light of a quarter moon. Dean makes himself noticeable, whistling cheerfully, sitting on the hood of the Impala to stare at the sky. If Sam was a rusalka he'd want to drown and eat Dean; he'd be drawn in by the whistling, the relaxed, peaceful grin. Dean waits and the waiting seems to go on forever.

"Maybe I should get naked. This fine ass can work wonders."

He tries to picture it, the way the light would look on Dean's body, but his stomach blooms warm and his spit turns acidic in protest, almost too painful to swallow.

"Just go closer to the water." He slides slower in the passenger seat, forehead pressed against the cool glass of the window, the only cool thing around that isn't likely to kill him. It's another uncomfortably warm summer evening, stale and muggy, heat that won't let up and gets under his skin, into his bones, makes him hot from the outside in.

Dean moves to the edge of the pond, stands on the wooden dock that's seen better days, swollen damp and swaying beneath Dean's feet. It looks like it could come apart any second. He wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it split right then and there, sent Dean tumbling through splinters and jagged shards of planks into the water, into the monster's den.

Nothing. For another hour there is nothing, only the gentle rocking of the dock, the tired way Dean rubs at his face to try and stay awake.

Something. A squelch of bubbles rise and erupt at the surface, sending ripples through the smoothness of the water. History repeats itself, but not an alligator this time, something deadlier and meaner. The anticipation eats away at him, corrodes his nerves and bores a hole into his chest, curious and waiting.

It hits the surface, slippery, pale, and not a rusalka. Rank and bloated with natural gases, the body drifts, bobbing. He's too far away to see clearly, but there's a gaping hole in the abdomen, deep red and oozing fluids and water. Dean stands on the dock wide eyed like he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. The body moves closer towards him and the movement is unnatural, misleading. There's no current in a pond and Dean edges closer to the end of the dock, reaches out.

"Dean don't!" He's tumbling out of the Impala, homemade torch held out as though it can banish away any kind of evil.

A hand curls out, pale and slender, nails immaculate and pointed, straining for Dean. Dean reels back just in time, cursing, gun out and ready to shoot at a monster the bullets will probably pass harmlessly through. The rusalka doesn't give chase, doesn't croon her haunting song. She pulls her hand back and retreats deeper, abandons the body and once they're sure she's gone he and Dean can take a look.

"Was the rusalka using the goddamn body as _bait_?" Dean sloshes a handful of water over the victim's face to rinse away the last traces of mud.

"Looks like it."

The guy is really just a kid. Dean finds his clothes balled up in the nearby weeds, goes through the wallet to find some ID. He's Whitney Murphy, seventeen years old, one hundred and sixty pounds, six foot one. His body is a hollow husk, like a pumpkin used for Halloween, innards and organs scooped out.

"The rusalka's gotten kind of picky. Pena barely had a scrap of flesh left on him. Whitney's only missing the good stuff."

"I'm not so sure it's a rusalka anymore. The MO doesn't fit. Why would it need to use bait to get you? It has breasts."

"True." Dean shifts, suddenly uneasy, and Sam's worried about the state of the fragile dock, the flimsy layer of wood separating them from the water and creature below. "Does this mean it's one of those jia-things?"

"Honestly? I don't know what it means."

"The fuck is in the water here, Sammy?" The name prickles his spine, he's not ten any longer, though maybe he always will be to Dean, and that realization is a slug of lead to the chest.

"I can say with absolute certainty that I don't know."

He stares into Whitney's empty eye sockets, helplessness a weight pressing down on his shoulders.

* * *

Madeleine Kelley's five-year-old daughter wets her bed the third week into the summer. Hannah comes into her room crying, real snotty and blubbering tears, frantic and heartbroken, shuddering chest, and can barely articulate what has happened. Maddie strips Hannah and puts her in the tub, strips the mattress, scrubs it with Febreze and baking powder, using every trick her mother taught her, and leaves the windows open so the room can air out.

"We all have accidents, baby." She soothes, brushing Hannah's damp brown hair. "I'm not mad at you." By then, Hannah's too sleepy to answer, and Maddie snuggles her tiny daughter and they curl up together in her bed.

Hannah's new fear of water comes next. She doesn't mind baths, still splashes and makes herself a beard out of bubbles, but she won't go anywhere near the waterway by their apartment complex, the lazy, trickling thing that passes for a creek. She cries if Maddie suggests a trip to the beach and when Maddie takes her out for a play date she pisses herself as her friend Caleb tries to drag her to the creek to show her the baby frogs.

"No!" Hannah screeches and lets her bladder loose, urine running down her stick thin legs, soaking her brand new sandals, ruining the bottom of her dress, coloring the white cotton yellow. Maddie's never been so embarrassed in her life, resists the urge to cover her face with her hands as Caleb's mother Isabel pats her arm and gives her the look that says _oh you poor thing, I'm so glad my son is well behaved_.

"Hannah!" She snaps, frustrated to her wits end, tired of Hannah's sudden water phobia. She snatches her up, holds Hannah at arm's length, strips her efficiently and clinically once they get to the car. Maddie swaddles her in a towel and buckles her in, disturbed by how quiet her daughter is, how she isn't hiccupping sobs and sniffling sorry again and again, trying to correct her wrongdoing by giving kisses and stroking her mother's cheek.

"I didn't wanna get eated." Hannah whispers ten minutes into the drive home, leaning pathetically against the side of her booster seat, looking distraught and miserable. "Like Whitney, momma. I didn't want to get eated like Whitney."

She thinks of the picture splashed across the front paper, the gruesome snapshots on the evening news. Whitney Murphy had watched Hannah on Thursday evenings, begrudgingly because they both knew his mother made him take the job, but he'd fix Hannah dinner, lounge with her on the couch and watch cartoons until Maddie got home from work.

"Oh sweetheart." She sighs, horrible sadness choking her, making her throat clench tight. "Nothing is going to eat you, I promise."

"Ariel will." Hannah tells her, closing her tear-filled brown eyes. "She lives in the water."

"Hannah, _Ursula_ is just from _The Little Mermaid_, remember?" She makes a mental note to put the DVD away for a few years down the line. Hannah's obviously not ready for it or she wouldn't be this traumatized and confused. "She's not real."

"Yes she is." Hannah insists, half asleep, bare feet poking out from beneath the fluffy, pink towel. "And she's going to eat us all up."

* * *

Dean dreams of rusalkas and water sprites and putrefied bodies. He sees blood and endless water and meat half stuck to human bones. He watches Sam get dragged under, eaten alive, tendons torn from his body as mouths rip into him, chewing like Dean does when he smacks on giant, freshly-made barbeque ribs. He can't do a thing to save Sam, he can only watch helplessly and shout when Sam's skeleton surfaces, and then he's face to face with his little brother's freakishly long limbs, now picked and licked clean of flesh.

"The police responded to our anonymous tip, finally." Sam throws the local paper at him; it lands with a soft flutter on the edge of his bed.

Whitey Murphy's graduation photo is in the middle of the front page, eclipsing the much smaller section devoted to the late Manuel Pena. Whitney's article is Technicolor and giant font while Manuel's is on the inside of page three, tacked onto the end of Whitney's story. If he had to guess the death of a local teenager is probably sexier to readers than the death of a middle aged man. Kids are full of promise. Whitney was college bound, an athlete, and Manuel had painted and built houses for the last three decades, he was nothing special.

"We should pay the family a visit. They're bound to give us a reason as to why their son was out in the middle of the night skinny dipping with a lake monster."

The front door is answered by a girl of around fourteen. She has the same jet black hair as Whitney, the same roundness to her face. They're definitely siblings, no doubt about it.

"My mom can't talk right now." She says quickly, like it's an apology, like she's ashamed and embarrassed by it. "She has a headache."

"What about your dad?"

"He's at work." She picks a gray tabby up off the floor, cuddles it close to her chest. "I can answer questions if you want."

"Sure." He smiles, feeling kind of dirty for trying to charm answers out of a girl barely old enough to be wearing a bra.

"I'm Coleen, by the way." Coleen pets her kitten's head, curls up with it on the couch, tucks her bare legs beneath her on the cushions. Her jean shorts are impressively short. He could still remember being young enough to think girls dressing like that was the coolest thing ever.

"Nice to meet you, Coleen." She blushes a bit when they shake hands; he turns to Sam, beaming. He's looking all kinds of gorgeous today, apparently.

"Do you know what your brother was doing the day he disappeared?"

"It was a Thursday." Coleen cradles the purring kitten as though it is her best and only friend. She scratches its white belly, touches its tiny paws. "He babysits for Miss Kelley on Thursdays. He watches her daughter Hannah." She pauses, swallows hard and deliberate. "He didn't want to babysit, he said it was gay, but he liked it really. He called Hannah his best girl, it was totally cute." She sniffles, buries her face against the top of her kitten's head. "He came home for a while after that and we ate dinner together. He went to a party later, I dunno when, I was already asleep but he promised he'd be home and that he wouldn't be too hungover to drive me to my dentist appointment on Friday morning." The kitten mewls and launches itself off the couch to attack a rolled up sock in the corner. "When he wasn't here I figured he'd hooked up with Katy Wu." Coleen stops, then adds, because to her it makes a difference, to her there is a good reason her brother would break a promise. "He said she has awesome boobs."

"Do you remember where the party was?"

She nods her head and it's a shame they have to be asking her questions like this. Sadness is never a good look on kids; he's never been able to stomach it. He wants to see her smile.

"Carlo Russo's house. That's where they found his car."

Sam jots down the address as Coleen recites it to him and Dean takes in the house. There are half a dozen pictures of Whitney and his sister on the mantle, most of them from when the kids were younger than ten years old. There are fewer snapshots of them now. There is one of Whitney in his graduation cap and gown, one of Coleen going to her first dance, but that's it. Whitney's parents no doubt thought there would be sixty more years for pictures, an entire lifetime. Marcy Phillips and Mrs. Pena and Mrs. Murphy are stuck with photos of lost loved ones that will never age, their images frozen in time. He's reminded of the surviving picture of their mother, her beauty and youth preserved in a single photo worn at the edges, tucked lovingly into their father's wallet.

"Thank you for answering our questions, Coleen." Sam touches his fingers to the kittens head as it rubs against his leg, purring.

"You'll find who did that to my brother?" She gazes up at them, wide, imploring brown eyes, thick black lashes. "Sherriff Joe says someone sliced him open and took out his guts." Sam's expression is somewhere between appalled and angry. "Well, he didn't say it like that, but it's what he _meant_. He just wouldn't say it."

"We'll find the person responsible, that's what the FBI does. We're way cooler than local law enforcement."

Sam insists they stop at the Kelley place before they head over to take another look at the pond. Sam says the waterway near the apartment connects to the river that runs in to the pond. He spent a good chunk of the morning going over maps of the local water systems, circling and filling in lines and shapes of blue throughout their map. If they can't figure the situation out they're looking at a massive purification ritual and that will only work if what's in the water is a spirit. If it's flesh and blood they're going to have to chum the waters and draw it in, send a bullet through its skull and the base of its spine.

Madeleine answers the door in faded green slippers, baggy athletic shorts and a t-shirt that at one time was bright yellow. Her short brown hair is frizzy from either humidity or recent sleep. He can't help but find her sort of cute, especially the way she holds her daughter on her hip the way he vaguely remembers mom balancing him, one arm snug under his ass to keep him from falling.

"What happened to Whitney was awful." She sits her daughter down at the table to eat a bowl of pink yogurt and strawberries, the sleeves of the little girl's too long purple and blue nightgown coming down past her hands. "Hannah's been having nightmares for weeks and she's terrified of the water. I'm just glad she'll take baths." Madeleine has dark circles under her eyes, the outward signs of a distressed parent.

"Whitney's only been dead for two days, how could she have nightmares for that long?" Sam's so smart sometimes, quick on the draw, notices what Dean didn't because he's eyeing the package of Oreos on the counter and the sad, dejected way Hannah pushes her yogurt around with her Pocahontas spoon.

"That's my fault." Madeleine shrugs, embarrassed, weary and upset. "I made the mistake of letting her watch _The Little Mermaid_. I didn't think it was that scary."

"Did you see Ursula's face?" He gets Madeleine to laugh and her laugh is light, sweet and happy. He'd like to stick around to hear her laugh more.

"Dean, why don't you go talk to Hannah and I'll finish up with Miss Kelley." He knows what Sam's doing, splitting them up to get _something_ out of the kid. Kids are more perceptive than adults, always will be, they see things that other people miss, the things that move and snarl in the dark.

"I don't know, she had a rough night." Madeleine puts a hand forward to stop him and Sam whispers quiet enough he thinks Dean can't hear him.

"He's great with kids, trust me, Hannah will be in love by the time we leave."

"Can I sit with you?" He's never had much experience with little girls. Sam never wanted to have tea parties or play with dolls, Sam never wore his hair quite long enough for neat braids, even if Dean teased that he did.

"I guess." Hannah stuffs a strawberry into her mouth, red juice trickling out of the corners of her mouth, her tiny fingers stained pink and sticky.

"Yogurt for breakfast? That's not cool."

"I _hate_ it." Hannah tells him firmly, eyes lighting up, relaxing, deciding that maybe Dean's okay; he's someone she can talk to. "It's mushy and cold and I want cereal but mommy only buys me healthy cereal."

"Yuck." He makes his most exaggerated, disgusted face. "I never fed my little brother yogurt for breakfast. I made sure he had Lucky Charms."

"'Cause you're a boy, boys are better at making delicious things." Hannah says it like it's fact, though, to a five-year-old it probably is. "Whitney never made me eat vegetables with dinner, he told momma he gave them to me, but really he wouldn't. We'd have pizza, pizza with extra cheese." Hannah breaks her last strawberry in half and offers him part of it, extends her wet little palm out in a gesture he can't refuse.

"Thanks." The strawberry is juicy and sweet, ice cold from being inside the fridge. "Whitney sounds like he was a fun guy."

"He was the best." She sniffles, almost near tears, that ready-to-cry thing that kids are so good at, that Sam used to do if he even thought he wasn't going to get his way for a second.

"This is gonna sound weird, but, did you see anything the day that Whitney went away?"

Hannah wipes her eyes, lower lip trembling despite the pinched look of control she tries to maintain on her face.

"You mean when he died, when he got eated. He didn't go away; he's dead and in the ground and worms are eating his bones just like Ariel did." Children can paint incredibly morbid pictures; they know how concrete and final reality can be, as predisposed to fantasy and wishful thinking as they can be. Hannah's mom doesn't bullshit her daughter, has brought her up knowing the cold, hard facts, that once you die you're gone and all you can do is hope to live life to the fullest while you can, eat and drink and fuck and have fun.

"What do you mean by Ariel, kiddo?" The carton of berries is on the table and he grabs a handful, cuts the tops off with a butter knife and puts them on her plate, arranges them in a smiley face shape like he would do for Sam.

"From the movie. Ariel ate Whitney. She's not nice, not really. She's pretty and she can't talk but she's mean and always so, so hungry."

His blood goes cold, strawberry sinking heavy in the pit of his stomach, skin prickling. Hannah's seen the rusalka, maybe even watched it dance its dance in the moonlight, creep out of its watery home. He wants to ask if its eyes really flash green in the blackness, if they're beautiful or ugly, if their hair drips and sags and sways with the ghastly rhythm of their bodies.

"Mermaids aren't real." He presses gently; only gentle enough to get her to keep talking, to prove him wrong.

"Yes they are." She stands up on her chair and they're eye-to-eye; hers are deep brown and determined. "I saw her. She wanted me to come and swim with her. She lives in the water and she ate Whitney, she _did_." Her voice breaks and the tears spring forth because she's had enough, because she's five years old and her world is suddenly scarier than anything she's ever known before. Hannah buries her face in his shoulder, wraps her arms around his neck. He lets her cling, pets her hair, pulls out all his old tricks, the ones that always worked on Sammy. She calms down and he brushes the last of her tears from her cheeks with his thumbs.

"Hey, your mom is still talking to my partner, how about we each have one cookie before they're done? I promise I won't tell." Hannah beams up at him and he thinks Sam was right. He's better with the little people, with the precious parts of someone else's family.

* * *

"A mermaid?" It's mind-boggling what Dean's relaying to him, utterly and entirely mind-boggling. "Hannah told you she saw a mermaid?"

"Technically she said she saw Ariel. Ariel is a mermaid. So I'm pretty sure she saw a mermaid."

"Her mother didn't notice anything." He can't get his head around the idea. Sure, there are water spirits and rusalkas and naiads, but there has never been a lick of lore about real mermaid sightings and certainly not this far inland in fresh water. "Did she give you a description?"

"She said Ariel Sam, so unless this mermaid specifically has giant tits and fiery red hair, I think we can go with a chick with a tail."

He opens his laptop the second they get back to the motel. Mermaids have depth to them, dozens of different legends. They resemble sirens, death omens, benevolent men and women of the sea. They are accidental killers who crush men they try to save from drowning or inadvertently drown men they pull down to live with them beneath the sea. The list goes on and on, a thousand different individual tales; mermaids that can walk on land, mermaids that lure men into the water to kill, mermaids that swaddle human-mermaid hybrids to their breasts. There are countless versions and he's starting to believe the words five-year-old Hannah whispered tearfully to his older brother. Mermaids fit the case just as well as rusalkas and alligators and forty other creatures could. A mermaid would make sense. It explains the mermaid using Whitney as bait, for not luring Dean in with a dance, for not being able to leave the water.

"Do you believe me yet?" Dean's breath reeks of bacon cheeseburger and fries, the tang of ketchup he uses by the gallon.

"I'm beginning to." Dean's uncomfortably close. Sam can feel the heat radiating off his brother's face, the warmth of Dean's body as he leans over Sam's shoulder to peek at the computer screen. "I don't understand _why_. Why would a mermaid of all things want to snack in Florida?"

"Old people make tasty treats?"

The joke falls flat, lifeless as the buzz of the air conditioner working at full blast.

"Do you want to be the one to call Dad's cell phone again or should I?"

Dean whips out his phone fast as a soldier draws a gun, as efficient as their father trained him to be. Where their father is concerned, Dean's as obedient as a robot. It takes some getting used to, because back at Stanford everyone thought and acted for themselves.

_The water is cold and murky and beautiful, the soft thrum of the lake's alien heartbeat pounding, the lapping of tiny waves against the shoreline. He tastes the minerals in the water, the particles of the mud, something richer, blood and flesh and fish scales._

_The sound of gurgling, a phantom swish, powerful muscles in a sleek, shiny tail. Her scales are stunning, lovely and silver, perfectly pristine. The sun reflects off them golden, brightens the darkness, the surreal underwater world._

_Resting against her chest, curled protectively in the crook of an arm, is a baby, motionless and pale; a morsel of a meal, the fattest, sweetest type of flesh. She holds the baby up, breaks the surface, light eerie on her gray-white face. The infant whimpers, kicks its tiny legs, struggling as she sets it among the floating plant life, wraps it in the green weeds near the bank, leaves it floating in less than a foot of water._

_Seconds, minutes, the pulse of the pond. She returns with the iron scent of blood under her sharpened fingernails, chips from the thin bones of fish stuck between her teeth. The shallows are empty, clear and still, tainted by footprints pressed into the wet mud. She searches through the clumps of weeds, digs into the mud, frantically searching, and her hands always come up empty._

_She screeches shrill as a banshee, loud with the horrible sound of crushing loss._

The pain is blinding, a new heart pounding inside his head. Visions are agonizing, white hot blades embedded at the base of his skull, piercing bones.

"Sam?" Dean's there like he always is, replaces Sam's fingers on his temples with his own, as though his hands can rub the ache away instead.

"The baby." He gasps out, blinking, the pain finally receding, settling back into a dull throb. The Phillips girl has the same dark eyes and hair and he doesn't know what it means, only that it means something dangerous and new. "I think she's her baby."

He can't articulate it further, not while his head is still ringing.

* * *

The lake house is one of those older houses, all wood, a high porch, dark purple shutters that seem to sag in the humidity and moisture. It's a cool day, strangely, and fog is rolling in off the surface of the lake, smearing the land with hazy white.

"I hate that we have to bother her like this." Sam sighs, tapping against the door with his knuckles, shifting awkwardly on the balls of his feet. They aren't dressed professionally today and it feels wrong somehow, to come back and bother this grieving woman who lost her children to a monster that in popular culture is never more than a beautiful, friendly face. "Showing up at their private summer home seems inappropriate."

"We gotta know." He tugs his jacket around him tighter, fighting the chill, a slow, bone deep shiver threatening to start. "It'll be easier to draw her out of we know what she wants. If you're right, we have to know." Sam knocks again, louder this time, hard enough to rattle the wood. He gives the doorknob an idle spin and surprisingly, the door opens. "Man, am I awesome or what?"

Sam rolls his eyes, all fake annoyance and affection.

"Too awesome for words, Dean."

"Don't mock me, bitch."

The house smells sour, it has that bitter, biting burn, sharp of alcohol. It's the scent of drunken misery, the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with grief, the way his dad taught him to get over his problems. A couple drinks and nothing seems so bad, melts into something warmer and sweeter.

"Oh no."

Marcy is passed out on the couch, bottle of tequila soaked into the white carpet. There are dried trails of tears down her cheek, as well as new tracks that glisten wetly. She's a wreck, flopped on her side on the couch. Dean feels sorry for her right then, perhaps sorrier than he ever has for anyone.

"We'll have to wait until she sobers up." He heads over to the playpen in the corner to get the baby, get her something to eat from the kitchen, examine her every finger and toe and make sure she's one hundred percent human. But she's not in the playpen and his skin itches with panic a bit, because he doesn't know how long Marcy's been out cold for, knows from childhood that caring for another person when your heart's been ripped out of your chest is too damn hard. "Sam, go upstairs and get the baby. I'll clean up." He doesn't know what he means by the sentence, only that he doesn't want to be the one to have to go upstairs and find a half dead baby, neglected and dehydrated. He's seen enough of monsters; he doesn't want to see the horrible things humans can do too.

He fills a princess Sippy cup with orange juice, shakes Cheerios into a tiny plastic bowl. The ritual takes him back to making breakfast for Sam, watching his pudgy little hands grab at his milkless cereal. He stops at the sink to gaze out the window, see the fog drift in on the early morning breeze. Instead he spots the blur of the little girl running through the grass, naked except for her diaper, hands stretched out, reaching towards something he can't see. The cup hits the floor when he drops it, Cheerios spilled at his feet, and he takes off after her, heart in his throat, nothing inside his chest.

The mermaid comes out of the water slowly, rises and lifts her head. She's beautiful, dark hair and eyes, pale skin, high breasts, long, elegant arms and fingers. She opens those arms, clicking and cooing foreign sounds that he's only heard from the kid. His lungs burn and he strips as he runs, ditches his jacket and over shirt, contemplates kicking off his boots but finds he doesn't have the time. The baby gets to the water, beaming, impossibly tiny hand latching onto one of the mermaid's fingers. She gets pulled in close, swaddled against the mermaid's breasts, and they disappear under the water together the second Dean plunges in.

* * *

There's an unsettling air of quiet in the house that twists into terror deep in Sam's gut. It's instinctual; he recognizes it, that awful tug that says something is wrong. He grew up learning to categorize the feeling all the nights he and his brother and father hunted werewolves in the dark, chased clawed and snarling things through the woods, following the trail of blood that dripped from its teeth. Something isn't right and the little girl isn't in her crib and the only sound to disrupt the stillness is his breathing, the way his heart beats rapidly and echoes in his head.

"Dean?" Dean doesn't answer him; Sam sprints down the hallway, down the stairs that creak violently in protest. "Dean!"

The screen door swings gently in the wood, then bangs loudly shut. "Dean!" He follows the path of Dean's footsteps through the grass, finds Dean's treasured leather jacket crumpled on the ground damp with dew, his flannel over-shirt dropped further ahead.

Everything freezes for a second, filmed over blue, and then it snaps back, pause to play. Dean's floating face down in the water while the toddler splashes in the shallows, giggling and tossing handfuls of water into the sky, bubbly and comfortable. "Dean, hold on." He leans over the side of the dock, as far as he can go, belly pressed flat against the dirty wood, hauls Dean up by the back of his t-shirt until he can get a better grip on him, haul him up with hands under his armpits.

"Sam." Dean spits and coughs up water that's tinged crimson, blood in the lines between his teeth. They haven't been separated more than five minutes, but Dean sounds like he's still managed to inhale the entire lake. "S'a mermaid. Cool huh?" Dean slurs his words, dazed and not entirely conscious.

"Yeah Dean, super cool." Blood is everywhere, spreading across the dock, gushing from a wound in Dean's stomach. Sam peels back his shirt to check, praying it's a flesh wound, a cut messy and bloody but superficial, all for show. The wound is deep, ugly, there are gray coils of Dean's intestines looping out through the jagged gash where her teeth or her fingers ripped out the skin meant to keep his insides in.

"Did you get the baby? Is she okay?" Dean's eyes roll back in his head and Sam puts his hands on Dean's stomach to try and prevent what's left of his blood and intestines from slopping out.

Sam looks over, just to check, but the little girl is gone and only her diaper is floating among the weeds. The guilt hits him then and it's like his own gut's been split open too. A child or his brother, that was the choice, and he'll stick with his pick, because he's lost Jess and everything he had and he won't let himself lose Dean too. The girl isn't in danger, not if they're right about everything, but it's her mother he wants to mourn for, the woman who has lost each of her three children to the same beast.

"She's fine, don't worry. I need to call an ambulance."

Dean spits up blood while Sam calls 911, his cell phone slick, his jeans dark and ruined. "You're going to be alright." He gathers Dean up, Dean's back to his chest, the way Dean used to let him sit in his lap when they were younger. He rests his chin on the top of Dean's head, hands messy hot, and cradles him like he used to with Jess, whispers soothing things into his temple as they wait. "We'll be back hunting in no time." He kisses the side of Dean's forehead, tastes lake water and sweat and iron.

Beneath them, Dean's blood seeps through the cracks in the wood and the droplets hit the surface of the lake in bright red beads. The mermaid lifts her child up, the toddler's mouth open like a baby bird's, hungry and searching, and she helps her daughter to catch dribbling streams of blood on her tongue.


End file.
